🇸🇬 Singapore finds few friends in death penalty

Tangaraju Suppiah executed at 46

May 01, 2023

Hello everyone,

A very sad and common story from Singapore in the last week.

I always try to make sure I include reporting from the countries we talk about, but as Kirsten Han notes in a newsletter I’ve linked below, there’s little in the way of Singaporean news media coverage. This is a feature, as she explains. 

Tangaraju Suppiah’s family have been exceptionally generous with global and regional media in the last few weeks, even as they go through a very difficult time. Most of the stories linked below contain comments, especially from his sister Leela Suppiah, that shows a man well-loved and supported.

Thanks for reading,Erin Cook

Tangaraju Suppiah, 46, was executed by the Singaporean state at Changi prison on Wednesday. He had been sentenced to death in 2018 after being found guilty of “abetting the trafficking of more than one kilogram of cannabis (1,017.9 grams),” as per the Central Narcotics Bureau. It marked the first execution in six months, CNN reports. 

Tangarajau’s case is particularly troubling, legal experts and abolition advocates said. “He never touched the cannabis he was accused of attempting to traffic. He was tied to the offence by two phone numbers found on the mobile phones of two men arrested by the CNB — one of which had been used to coordinate the cannabis delivery,” the Transformative Justice Collective said, also reported by CNN. 

Billionaire Richard Branson, who has been a vocal and repeated critic of Singapore’s death penalty over the years, took to his blog to argue against Tangarajau’s death. In a post titled ‘​​Why Tangaraju Suppiah doesn’t deserve to die,’ in which he agrees with advocates like the TJC: “Many observers have been shocked by how thin the evidence against him was and feel he should never have been charged, let alone convicted, to begin with. I agree,” he wrote. 

The Home Affairs Ministry is not interested in Branson’s arguments. “He shows disrespect for Singapore’s judges and our criminal justice system with such allegations. Our approach has worked for us, and we will continue charting our own path according to what is in the best interests of Singaporeans,” the Ministry said in a statement, as reported by Bloomberg. 

But how true is that? With last year’s executions too, how much of an impact do executions have on international drug trafficking? “None of these people are persons of significance in the grand scheme of drug trafficking operations in Singapore and yet, they are killed under the guise that it was necessary to protect Singapore,” Dobby Chew, the executive coordinator of the Anti Death Penalty Asia Network (ADPAN), told Al Jazeera. 

The United Nations copped a pushback too after issuing a statement condemning the execution. A statement from the spokesperson for the High Commissioner for Human Rights published the day before the execution called on Singapore to “reconsider” its plans and noted “concerns around due process and respect for fair trial guarantees.” 

In its own statement, Singapore’s mission to the UN said the bloc had misrepresented the deterrent effect of the death penalty in drug cases. This has been widely debunked. After the introduction of the death penalty for firearm offences in 1973 resulted in a deep drop in cases. “Today, firearms offences are very rare in Singapore,” the mission said in a statement, as per CNA.  

Reading list

 

There has been plenty of international media coverage of Tangaraju's execution, highlighting that it was just for cannabis, a plant that's increasingly decriminalised or legalised in other jurisdictions, or pointing to the due process and fair trial concerns present in his case. Here's a selection of coverage, in no particular order: BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English, TaiwanPlus, the New York Times, the Guardian...  

Lianhe Zaobao also carried a short article on the public event that we'd organised where Tangaraju's family pleaded for clemency and a review of his case. But the English language mainstream media didn't bother to cover Tangaraju's imminent execution except to amplify the Ministry of Home Affairs' statement getting shitty about Richard Branson's criticism.

The number of executions carried out in Singapore has dropped substantially since the 1990s; in 2012, a number of minor amendments were made to the death-penalty laws. Yet Singapore has stubbornly maintained a hard-line policy on drugs that mandates the death penalty for even minor infractions. Executions restarted with a renewed vigor last year after a two-year hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic. (The Ministry of Home Affairs did not respond to my list of questions, but said that “drugs not only kill but cause an immeasurable amount of harm to families and societies as a whole,” and that “the death penalty is an essential component of Singapore’s criminal justice system and has been effective in keeping Singapore safe and secure.”)

Singapore has justified its tough drugs policy on its proximity to the Golden Triangle, a Southeast Asian region that is a major gateway for illicit drug production and trafficking. But many of its neighbors have recently softened their stances: Thailand legalized the growth and trade of cannabis in 2022, while Malaysia the same year moved to end its use of a mandatory death penalty for nonviolent drug offenses. In the United States, at least 21 states have loosened restrictions on cannabis to allow for limited nonmedical use.

But that appears unlikely in Singapore, whose strict policy on drug crimes has made it an outlier among other similarly wealthy countries. Singapore executed at least 11 people for drug offenses in 2022, according to Harm Reduction International. The U.K.-based nonprofit, which advocates for treating drug addiction as a medical problem, said Singapore is one of fewer than a dozen countries — including Yemen, Iran and Sudan — that have mandatory capital punishment for some drug offenses.

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